2014 – Avoiding the Lost-Assignment and Task Epidemic or LATE

The boss is at the door and she is asking where that thing is you discussed a month ago. The panic begins to rise because you barely remember the assignment! Wait, you gave it to Bob, but he just left on a 6-week vacation to the Himalayas and forgot to email you his files from his hard drive. It looks like you will be recreating Bob’s analysis…

And so begins my article on using a TASKING methodology and the introduction of a tongue in cheek disease ‘the Lost-Assignment and Task Epidemic (or LATE)’. The methodology was published in the Fall 2014 edition of the Financial Management Institute’s (FMI) Journal, a copy of the article is available here: Fall 2014 FMI Journal. The is one that I developed and refined over the past 15+ years. The FMI article does a pretty good job of describing it at a high level but in the director’s cut I have drilled down a bit more.